Putative Exercise Hormone Irisin Boosts Mouse Brainpower

Mice lacking irisin didn’t exhibit the cognition improvements that typically follow exercise, and in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, treatment with the hormone reduced cognitive decline.

Written bySophie Fessl, PhD

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The hormone irisin is necessary for the cognitive benefits of exercise in healthy mice and can rescue cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published August 20 in Nature Metabolism.

According to the authors, these results support the hypothesis that irisin undergirds the cognitive benefits of exercise—a link that has been long debated. In addition, this study has “paved the way for thinking whether irisin could be a therapeutic agent against Alzheimer’s disease,” says biologist Steffen Maak with the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany, who has been critical of the methods used to study irisin in the past and was not involved in the study.

Many studies have found that exercise is good for the brain, but the molecular mechanisms responsible for the cognitive boost have remained elusive. During her postdoctoral studies, neuroscientist Christiane Wrann found that the gene ...

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Meet the Author

Sophie Fessl, PhD
Sophie Fessl is a freelance science journalist. She has a PhD in developmental neurobiology from King’s College London and a degree in biology from the University of Oxford. After completing her PhD, she swapped her favorite neuroscience model, the fruit fly, for pen and paper.
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